ok, i did a reinstall of debian today and for some odd reason i can't print. i have everything that i need installed, cups server is running and i have the correct ppd file. i have an hp deskjet 712c connected via parallel and the system recognizes the printer but i can't print. i thought it might be the printer so i tried it in knoppix, and it worked there. i configured it through the browser and it even says that it's ready. has anyone had this problem before?

Yes -- several times

Usually the problem was solved by setting the debug level in Cups to 'verbose', and then checking the logs after attempting to print. Usually it was a permissions problem -- in some cases root also has to be added to the list of users allowed to print.

Good luck,

mj

not sure how to go about doing this...

also, how do you add users to be allowed to print? i checked the log and there's something about a PID exiting with a status of 1 and is saying something about changing some level to debug. excuse my stupidity, i don't really know that much about cups

I tend to do most of my work under KDE, thus Cups is configured from the control panel -> peripherals -> printers. The debug level can be changed from the Print Server menu, users can be added for each printer.

If you are configuring Cups entirely from the command line, then the printer (and user) settings are in /etc/cups/printers.conf, and the debug level is in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

Cheers,

mj

ok, in my printers.conf file, there's a bit of info, but there's nothing in it that deals with users.
as for the debug level, the only thing i found was a section called LogLevel and there are 6 levels. debug2, debug, info, warn, error, and none. it's currently set to debug2. i just now noticed that whenever i check the job state of my past jobs, everything says "aborted" and whenever i click on "restart job" i get "Error: client-error-not-possible" for whatever reason.

could you post the part of the log where the "exit 1" message is contained?

ok, i reinstalled cups, made sure i had the correct ppd. i created a new printer but this time it said Device URI: parallel:/dev/unknown-parallel0 and said that it couldn't detect the printer. so i went into printers.conf and changed it to /dev/lp0 so that it recognizes the port at which it's connected. i go to print a test page and it says it's sent but whenever i go to Jobs it says "aborted" next to the job ID. my logs were cleared upon the installation and to see what has happened since then here is my current log , just to clear some things up i installed cups through apt from one of my debian install discs. i have the foomatic db installed and something called gs-esp installed. the ppds are located in /usr/share/ppd and there's a /usr/share/cups that contains the dirs banners, charsets, data, doc-root, fonts, model, templates, and a file called calibrate.ppm. there is also a /etc/cups which contains the necessary dirs and conf files, but it also contains a ppd dir which is empty. i assume it's pulling the ppd file(s) from /usr/share/ppd. all this seem right?

On my system (knoppix hdd installation, so it should have the debian dir structure) the ppd files are in /usr/share/cups/model, /usr/share/ppd doesn't exist here.
All other dirs are equal to your installation.

Normally, when you install a printer, the selected ppd is copied to /etc/cups/ppd/<nameofprinter>.ppd
(so if you call your printer lpprinter which uses hpdj500.ppd, the ppd /usr/share/cups/model/hpdj500.ppd will be copied to /etc/cups/ppd/lpprinter.ppd)

your log also references a ppd in /etc/cups/ppd, you can try to manually copy the right ppd.
There is a call to pnm2ppa in your log, but this file is not found. Try installing this using apt-get install pnm2ppa (the package exists and has version 1.12-14 in my database)

I'll be on holiday for the next week, hope this could help, else I will have a glance after I came back...

Flo

bingo, that was it. it prints now thank you so much! i wonder why debian doesn't include this alongside the cups package?